Kite Club: Committer Edition

Here in Ottawa, everyone is looking forward to summer vacations after an extremely busy release cycle. My good friend Sonia has introduced us to sport kiting.


Flying a kite is a very relaxing way to spend lunch hour - thoughts of builds and bugs are swept away. Sonia can really make the kite dance.



I just try to keep it up in the air without crashing spectacularly. In some ways, it's similar to being a buildmeister...



Some people see kiting as an extreme sport. Others go kite skiing.

The other day, we discovered that Prism offers a p2 sport kite. It is described as follows

STYLUS P.2
The P.2 develops impressive pull in a strong breeze but responds with crisp precision to your inputs. It’s astonishingly easy to recover from a collapse or a crash due to its oversized air inlets, and when the wind picks up it’ll really scream along. Want more power? Stack one, two, or three more P.2’s in a train and get ready to go for a ride!

I look forward to seeing p2, Eclipse 3.4 and Ganymede take flight.

Read more...

Platform-releng endorses p2, not paddles

Zx has suggested that the Eclipse project's releng team has become soft. What? In fact, we're in pretty good shape due to the amount of shovelling we've done to move the 4m (13 feet) of snow that has fallen in Ottawa this winter. We don't have to resort to Photoshop for extra muscle tone :-)

I did give out out a clown nose this week. It wasn't well received...although in the process I learned some new French vocabulary from a certain Equinox committer. Integrating p2 into the build was really a group effort. We are using the p2 code compiled in the build to build the SDK..so there are bootstrapping issues. It would have been ideal to have more time to test the integration but with EclipseCon immediately followed by M6 we had to get in this week's build. I'll write later on how we are transforming our build process with p2. It promises to alleviate many pain points. However, as always, change reveals many implementation details. For other teams, the transformation will be much much simpler. We now have a build that works with p2 goodness. In the end, that's all that matters.

I saw a preview of Pascal's p2 talk this afternoon and I'd highly recommend taking the opportunity to attend it at EclipseCon and learn more.

As for using paddles as a deterrent for build breakage...well eclipse.org is rated PG. I'll leave the paddling activities to other websites...

Read more...

Eclipse 3.4M5 now available

Eclipse 3.4M5 is now available for download . Please peruse the New and Noteworthy here.


M6 promises to be even more dramatic milestone, with plans for new Equinox and PDE bundles to hatch from incubation and into the SDK.

Read more...

Happy 6th Birthday Eclipse!

Eclipse is six years old today.

From
1.0 to wow!


Happy birthday!

Read more...

Eclipse 3.3.1.1 now available

Eclipse 3.3.1.1 is now available.

Q. What is Eclipse 3.3.1.1?

A. It is Eclipse 3.3.1 with six additonal bug fixes as listed in the readme



Eclipse 3.3.1.1 is NOT

• Eclipse 3.3.1: Extended edition


• Eclipse 3.3.2


• Platform 9 3/4

Q. How are fixes backported to a maintenance stream?

A. During each build we tag both the map files and the builder projects with the build id such as I20071023-0800. This insures that each build is repeatable. If we need to back port fixes to release, I just branch the releng project from the tag and the developers branch the relevant projects, release their code, and update their map in the new branch.

Q. Why do some of the features in 3.3.1.1 have feature versions listed as 3.3.2?

A. The marketing name of "Eclipse 3.3.1.1" doesn't need to correspond to plugin and feature versions. We could start naming our releases in step with the hurricane names, for instance Eclipse Melissa. However, if you looked at the components of Eclipse Melissa, they would still adhere to the versioning numbering guidelines.


For instance, Eclipse 3.3.1.1 has the following feature versions
cvs -> 1.0.1
equinox -> 3.3.1
jdt -> 3.3.1
pde -> 3.3.2
platform -> 3.3.2
rcp -> 3.3.2
sdk -> 3.3.2

When we release the first bug fix in a new stream of a release, we increment the service version of the bundle and the feature that contains it.

Now on to Eclipse 3.4M3 :-)

Read more...

Stay out of the cold with the latest eclipse I-candy

After all the excitement of EclipseCon, I arrived home to realize that although Ottawa currently lacks Santa Clara's warm breezes and sunshine, spring is definitely on the way because ...
1) The melting snow decided to visit my basement
2) Eclipse 3.3 M6 is next week

M6 represents the API freeze for the Europa release of the top-level Eclipse project. In fact, at this juncture, teams must ask the PMC for approval to make API changes.

If you are adopting 3.3 components as part of the Europa release or for your commercial project, it's a good idea to take a look our integration builds, not just milestone builds. Consuming your dependancies each milestone means that you are in only in a position to understand changes after the milestone has shipped. Taking a look at the builds in the weeks leading up to a milestone allows you to provide feedback on new functionality through bugzilla or mailing lists, specify how it impacts your use case and offer to help out :-) while the code is still under development.

The latest integration build is available here.

Of course, as we gear down to the Europa release at the end of June, the number and scope of changes will start to wane. Why? Submitting major new functionality close to the shipping date puts the release at risk. We like to ship and then everyone takes vacation. It's a tradition around here.

To mitigate against the temptation to release risky code, the rules of engagment in an end game plan specify increasing levels of sign off and verification for changes as we march toward Europa release date. This ensures that there is a conversation among members of the team regarding whether a change should be implemented, the associated risks and the possible impact to downstream teams, instead of just one person with the fervent wish to close another bug.

The M6 build menu looks something like this...

Monday starts off with a series of builds toward a test candidate.

Tuesday is test day, where people test the Monday's test candidate.

Wednesday is another build day where teams submit fixes to the issues they discovered during the test pass.

Thursday we have a final build and then ask teams for sign off. Inevitably, there is a rebuild to address a late breaking issue.

Read more...

Eclipse 3.3M5 now available

As Dejan mentioned earlier, many people were anxiously waiting the release of Eclipse 3.3M5. Milestone week...end is always dramatic and the 2007 edition is no exception. Sexier forms, SWT on the splash, a new launcher, a shiny new pdebuild that fetches prebuilt bundles via http a la Orbit - M5 is more exciting than an astronaut love triangle.

These and many other new goodies are documented in the New and Noteworthy.

Download M5 from you friendly neigbourhood mirror.

Read more...

Who will make a splash at Eclipsecon 2007?

And by splash I don't mean who will jump in the hotel pool. Who will be the lucky ones to have their smiling faces appear in an Eclipse SDK vanity build? Last year it was Steve and the Netbeans girls In 2005, the winner of the Eclipsecon trivia contest had her own Daniela build. Whatever happens, it will be very exciting.

Read more...